Patronizing or Inciting? Debating Terrorism in an Age of Anger

A. Dirk MosesABC Religion and Ethics
2 Jun 2017

In a time of paranoia and anger, it is imperative that the Australian public sphere and security apparatus cultivate a nuanced, non-sloganistic discussion of the causes of terrorism.
Credit: Michael Dodge / Getty Images

A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.

We should be angry, writes Janet Albechtsen in The Australian, over the latest terrorist outrage in Manchester. She goes onto list the other recent terrorist attacks in western cities - from Nice, to Paris, Boston, Copenhagen and Sydney - and asks: where does this end?

The anger is as understandable as the question is urgent. Why should Westerners be murdered by Muslims while taking a stroll, running a marathon, sitting in a cafe, or attending a concert?

But anger is not thinking. On the contrary, it can be dangerous if unaccompanied by disciplined reflection.

Anger is presumably the emotion felt by the man who murdered two defenders of a Muslim woman shielding her from his abuse on a Portland train. The same applies to a British man who kicked a pregnant Muslim women in the stomach, causing the loss of her baby.

They presumably also thought that "Islam is a problem," as Gary Johns attempted to explain in his column in The Australian.

If anger was not the operative emotion, perhaps hate? Certainly, Johns's column, which casts Islam as a barbaric religion, can hardly be read as an exercise in careful differentiation at a time of acute public anxiety about religion and terror.

The same can be said of Jennifer Oriel, who also in The Australian wrote that it is "time to confront local Islamists" - adding, "this is war". Meanwhile, yet another columnist for this newspaper, Chris Kenny, accused the country's senior security official, ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis, of patronizing Australians for supposedly soft-pedalling the link between refugees, Islam and terrorism.

In the circumstances, Lewis and his colleagues are exercising precisely the required circumspection. They know things that News Corp Team Australian does not.

Albrechtsen alleges that the case of the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, demonstrates that Muslim community self-policing does not work, because allegedly no one in his family or neighbourhood informed authorities about the danger he posed. In fact, they did but were ignored by security officials.

Like many others, Albrechtsen makes much of Man Haron Monis's refugee status to insinuate that refugees are a security threat. But if Australian authorities had listened to their Iranian counterparts, who warned them about his criminality, he would not have been free to run amok here. Our foreign policy seems to have forbidden such a consideration.

The consistent message from The Australian is that refugees pose a terrorist risk, and therefore that our agencies should engage in stricter scrutiny - extreme vetting, perhaps - of applications. They are very strict already, of course, and extreme vetting does not address the key issue that scholars of terrorism like Olivier Roy have identified: most Islamic terrorists emerge among refugees' children - the so-called second generation.

Contrary to the views of Albrechtsen, Johns, Oriel and Kenny, terrorists don't come from the heart of Muslim communities but are youths alienated from them. Roy's analysis of these men's biographies shows a pattern of petty criminality and personal despair, even a nihilist inclination, that renders them suggestible to extremist recruitment, often through the internet, sometimes in marginal mosques. That is why Australian police have cracked down on internet incitement of terror and why they work with Muslim community leaders. Those relationships are crucial to everyone's security. Pronouncing a state of emergency and declaration of war would imperil them.

The security professionals understand the multi-causal nature of extremism, but these columnists consistently point to Islamist ideology as the sole source of terrorist violence. In doing so, they ignore uncomfortable facts and distort others. Albrechtsen begins by stating that "Islamic terrorists chose to kill Jews in their homeland," without mentioning that the Holy Land is also the Palestinian homeland. In view of that reality, her founding assumption about the centrality Islamism is weakened: resisting occupation in the name of national liberation is the central motivation for Palestinians; not that it justifies attacking civilians.

Gary Johns realises this sort of connection when he observes that the IRA was a secular, nationalist movement which "hated the English, who happened to be Anglican, for occupying their land." Leaving aside the fact that many Britons belong to other Christian denominations, he does not engage in the necessary differentiation when considering terrorist acts committed by Muslims. Religious fanaticism is his sole causal factor.

A nuanced analysis - a multi-causal one - cannot ignore the evidence about terrorist motivations staring us in the face. If conservative columnists want to highlight terrorist rhetoric about Shari'a law, the cult of death and heavenly virgins, they also need to include the stated anger about some Western (and Russian) policies and actions in the Muslim majority countries. We now know that Monis viewed footage of Arab children killed in Western airstrikes. They continue. In March, for example, press sources reported that 33 civilians were killed by a U.S.-led strike in Raqqa, Syria, but I don't see these events incorporated into the analytical mix.

Revenge and retribution for such acts - to which Russia was also subject for its brutal conquest in Chechnya - are predictable albeit unjustifiable reactions to what is euphemistically called "collateral damage." If the narrative of Muslim persecution at the hands of Western "infidels" can be questioned as paranoid self-pitying, as we read so often in the Australian media, then the fact that Western - including Australian - military forces inflict collateral damage in Muslim-majority countries cannot be ignored. Watching hours of videos in which Muslim civilians are bombed by aircraft and drones may anger some people, lead to hatred and violent acts.

Experts have long understood this connection. Addressing the Iraq Inquiry (which issued the Chilcot Report) in 2010, the former director general of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, stated that the British participation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 had "substantially" increased the threat of international terrorism. But when politicians eventually learned the lesson and suggested that the "war on terror" has failed - in part because smashing states like Iraq and Libya created a vacuum in which extremists could flourish - they are pilloried by true believers who think that the campaign against ISIS can be advanced by a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, the source of the austere brand of fundamentalist Islam that culminates in ISIS.

If columnists in The Australian have criticised the Saudis as a factor in the terrorist equation, I must have missed it. Such criticism is often seen in the UK press, however. Resisting the patronizing of the News Corp press, the British public agrees with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn's assessment that UK foreign policy in part imported Middle Eastern conflicts into Britain. No one thinks that excuses the violence, but it does help explain it.

What is more, we now know that British authorities allowed Abedi to return to Libyaas a sixteen year old to participate in the anti-Gaddafi uprising that was backed by many Western allies. As with the Saudi alliance, Islamic extremism can be instrumentalized for Western geopolitical purposes - but, again, we don't hear much about that.

Even so, it is as simplistic and misleading to blame "the West" for terrorism as it is to suggest that "Islam is the problem." This issue is more complex than can be tidily wrapped up in a short commentary, although it is worth pondering how people of many faiths and nationalities can be seized by paranoid rage in this age of anger. It is imperative that the Australian public sphere and security system can generate a nuanced, non-sloganistic discussion.

Let us start with the Chilcot Report. It criticized two leaders of British security agencies for toeing the government's line on the Iraq war, thereby effectively misleading the nation about the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein, with all its terrible consequences. One of the report's lessons is that the hot-headed political partisanship we see with some Australian pundits should not be allowed to intimidate security professionals like Duncan Lewis. They don't need the advice of Pauline Hanson, Andrew Bolt and their ilk. Peter Dutton's defence of Lewis is encouraging.

Given the pundits' influence, however, we need to ask: what kind of Australia are they entreating? Do they want to emulate, say, Turkey or India, where journalists and academics who don't support the government's security agenda are harassed, physically intimidated, incarcerated? The nationalist government in India need not go so far as the Turkish one because vigilante groups can do their work for them.

It is no exaggeration to warn against such developments here when in Cronulla we had a pogrom against anyone with dark hair, when columnists decry academics and the ABC for undermining Western values and effectively supporting terrorism, and when punters are incited to fantasize with wild and violent rhetoric. Read, for example, the online comments on Gerard Henderson's columns. The fact that these comments are said to be "moderated before publication to promote lively and civil debate" indicates what The Australian understands as acceptable political discourse.

Seen in this light, the purpose of its relentless hounding of Gillian Triggs and campaign against section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act becomes clearer: for sections of the public who feel shackled by "political correctness" to neutralize fifth columns.

To be sure, Chris Kenny - ever conscious of the moral high ground - criticized his friends at Quadrant for an article that wished the Manchester bomber had instead blown himself up at the ABC's Ultimo studios. Quadrant's desired neutralization (since retracted) went too far. In doing so, however, Kenny also revealed the intimate relationship between the centre-right and far-right by stating that he understood the article's exasperation with Q&A.

Authoritarian-populist governments, which often operate under the wartime states of emergency that Jennifer Oriel urges for Australia now, routinely disavow vigilante and pogrom-like violence perpetrated by those who take literally what they hear and read - namely, that Muslims, academics and the ABC really are traitors and terrorist sympathizers - while expressing solidarity with their indignation.

Given this pattern of insidious political rhetoric, the issue is not that security officials are patronizing the public, but that some journalists are inadvertently inciting elements of it. Do they want two, three, many Cronullas? Why deride the "I'll ride with you" campaign when we know the violent potential on our public transport? Look at what is happening the United States and UK, let alone India and Turkey.

At the moment, the distinction between The Australian and Breitbart is hard to draw. There are intelligent and astute journalists at The Australian, like Nikki Savva; it would be good to hear more from them and less from war-mongers.

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For a very long period, religious people supposed that one could construe secularity as metaphysical neutrality and benign indifference. But increasingly, this mask is being torn away and it is the supposedly marginal issues of "conscience" which are most of all in public dispute.

To disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.

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